So, as the end of the year approaches, I'd get a detailed review of the state of Forza Horizon 5 coming into Year 1. It's been over a year and a month since release and PG added some 137 cars (unfortunately, well over half of them are returns), new features (which I could care less), new Stories (apart from Horizon Origins, ranges from dull to completely awful) and a truck load of empty promises. Still interested in the "empty promises" gamut? Let me explain in detail.
Before I do that however, I still noted some high points with this game, and as usual it's the core gameplay of driving and its physics. They're the best they've been around and I do look forward to see what the FM reboot could do in terms of physics. Graphics, too are a high point and to date it is a really detailed game, nothing short of admirable. And aside from that, back at launch the game itself was on the road to greatness. But something seriously went wrong along the way. So allow me to explain what happened since launch and how the new iteration lost its luster so bad.
Going into this game at launch (and at early access) I was fairly excited. Playground made the newest iteration of the Horizon series and I was astounded with the effort with the scenery and map of Mexico (even though it's a bit rough around the edges). They made a diverse car list of 500+ strong, online functionality and a whole progression dedicated to accolades and expeditions, to go along with an 'Evolving World'. I was in love with the game, but after a month later (and the longer I played over the spring and summer), I quickly realized that they have cut so many corners. First of all FH4 at the end had over 600+ cars including some FEs and rare cars. FH5 seemed to have held back so many cars that were present in the last game. Such as for example, the 3 Renaults (all from FH4 and two of them - the 2010 Megane RS and 2010 Clio RS - date back to the 360 era) they drip-fed for the next Series when they clearly had no reason to be exclusionary. They had the license, but for some reason they held it back often just to convince new players that they are getting "new" content.
To give you an idea of what updates were for during the first half of 2022, where the car pass was around, and the latter half of 2022, which I will go into great detail, this boils down to this:
Series 1-9 (Nov. '21 to Jul. '22): Some new features, a Horizon Drift Club Story (unremarkable, in my opinion), at least two or three dozen FH4 cars and a smattering of new-to-Forza cars, and 42 car pass cars, just one of which was last seen in FM4.
Series 10-16 and beyond (mid-July '22 onwards): The car pass ends, The Hot Wheels Expansion, a whole rash of dubious partnerships (namely Extreme E and Donut Media), even more FH4 cars and even fewer new-to-Forza cars.
So why have the latter updates have been so horrible lately? I'll leave it to Australian YouTuber Ericship as he has a video that showed some constructive insight about the issue, but for me, I'll explain each in some detail on what could have been.
Series 10, the Extreme E saga, was a blown opportunity. I was going into this hoping they'd at least have to represent the 2022 season's cars and to have a whole map dedicated to new routes for offroading races. To be fair, it did... except they did made 10 cars separately (which is normal because that is how licensing a race car is, you can't just swap liveries on a whim). The races are all the same as it is, and they didn't change in the four-week span of this event. The outright worst offender is not the 10 different Extreme Es. It's the other Festival Playlist cars they added. Four Porsches (of which only one of them was iconic), and three of them are restomods, which is the last thing I want to see in a Forza game.
Series 11, Rami's Racing History, was meant to be a historical connection to Ramiro's racing heritage (you know, the annoying guy who sounds like the Geico gecko). What we got instead was a glorified 'Made in Mexico' story that had little to no connection to the cars of Mexico (in part due to most of the existing assets being old Forza models and the Vocho itself is not even the 2003 final model), and the reward car is just another FE. While I do like how they curated the eras, the seasonal prizes couldn't be more egregious. Clearly somebody missed the point of what 'racing heritage' means nor did they do extensive research of Mexican racing (specifically the Carrera Panamericana, which they did try half-heartedly). Oh and they gave us a bootleg Tesla, Xpeng.
Series 12, Horizon Road Trip, although it wasn't bad, it still felt a bit underwhelming with the cars. At least there is a good mix of both returning and new, and the Lynk & Co 03+ is nothing short of incredible. Even though it is a Chinese-Swedish brand, it handled insanely good for a FF layout hybrid sedan. And that is definitely something that would fit the FM reboot. As for the events, sadly, it left a lot to be desired. Remember how there would be new events and routes? Well, they're not using them. And the routes are all the same which adds more into the repeitition pile.
Series 13 is the biggest letdown of all the Series updates in this game. It is the 10-year Horizon Anniversary update and while there were some parts that were good, such as the props being recreated from previous Horizon games and the new rims, everything else is either a mixed bag or just poor choices. First off, let's start with the mixed bag that's called 'Horizon Origins'. While the ideation is very much promising, the execution leaves much to be desired. As much as I can endure the insufferable dialogue from Scott Tyler, the Horizon chapters they represented were pretty shallow, especially with the third iteration involving the offroaders. Does anyone remember the Baldwin offroader that had its lone appearance in Horizon 3? They could not license it anymore, so a different offroader (which, by the way, was also DLC in said game), the F-150 Baja. Midnight Battles were very poorly-executed races with shallow rewards. It is so sad that the days of racing against a modified car (even with widebody kits or a supercharged muscle car) of FH3 vibes, seem to be left out of the limelight. While the Horizon Mixtape is promising the music curated is pretty less than stellar, with EDM predominating the list. No songs from Horizon Rocks (you know it as the precursor of Horizon XS), and even if they did add them later, they'd just be censored as well. And the cars were all recycled content. I get that Darius' car - the 599XX - is admittedly iconic, but the other three (Agera, Eagle Speedster, One-77) were hardly iconic to FH1. What they could've done was bring back lost FH1 cars like the Toyota FJ Cruiser for example. Or even cars that haven't been to FH in a long time, like the Holden FX Sedan, '13 Audi S4, 2014 Range Rover... And they don't mention Holly Cruz no more.
Series 14 is Donut Media, and as expected it was hyped to feature their project cars and their liking. What we got instead were yet more rehashed content aside from a Lynk & Co TCR car that is surprisingly good. But everything else was woodies, and having them all together isn't really associated with DM themselves. Between the utterly insufferable dialogue that was forced upon us and the story itself being a glorified tuning tutorial, this was by far the worst update. What's more, they are planning to spread it out evenly in several parts.
Remember when I said a few pages back on why PG should experiment on the 'Evolving World' thing seriously and even compared it to what SCS did to the world maps? That statement is pretty much rock-solid true. Prior to launch Mike Brown promised us something good out of the Evolving World and so far they barely use it. It's been over a year and we have been driving the same exact courses ad nauseam for thousands of times. Tell me this: Why is it so hard to make new routes? Would it hurt to break the monotonmy with some different layouts every now and then, and I'm not talking about EventLabs in the grand scheme of things. Like for example new seasonal championships with custom routes would be far more rewarding than re-racing the same 3-5 races over and over. It's really tiresome and it feels more like wasted potential the more you play it, and makes it even more grindy. What's more, Brown did promise that new races would be added to the updates, prior to the release. Much to anyone's hopes those promises were broken. 13 months later and they STILL didn't bother adding something fresh to the table in track variety. Something that should take about a week at most. Even the changes to the Evolving World were just patchy at best and just not enough at worst. And even then they just last roughly a month if we're lucky.
If we're talking about map expansions (not the other kind) they should add some new roads every now and then. Adding an industrial area would certainly help, and so would expanding north or south with the map boundaries would really bring about new events and prevents it from being stale over time. But I can't imagine how much time it would take though...
As the new year approaches I'd like to propose a New Year's Resolution to PG:
-Limit the amount of returning cars to one or two (maximum per update), licensing notwithstanding
-Add past exclusives to autoshow (6 months minimum)
-Put an end to the shallow car prizes on the seasonal challenges. At least give us H2F cars.
-Take the 'Evolving World' thing seriously. I'd like to see more than just decorations on the stadium or smashables.
I don't mean to rant on the state of FH5 in this massive wall of text, but it's hard to see so many good ideas like the Evolving World go to waste like this. And especially the replayability. I'm already burnt out considerably so I only do the bare minimum of 20 points just to get the Rebel and the other 5 cars we're getting.
